The Problem With Jon Stewart - The Iran War and Our Energy Future with David Wallace-Wells

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

As the war with Iran disrupts global energy markets and accelerates a reckoning with fossil fuel dependence, Jon is joined by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Opinion writer and author of the bestseller "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming." Together, they explore the war's global and domestic fallout, discuss how this moment is forcing countries to reconsider their dependence on oil and American power, and consider whether we can build systems resilient enough to withstand compounding disruptions. Plus, Jon answers listener questions about some of his favorite podcast topics, Trump on Jeopardy!, and whether his kids actually like him. This episode is brought to you by: FAST GROWING TREES - Go to https://fastgrowingtrees.com/tws and use code TWS to get 20% off your first purchase. QUINCE - Head to https://Quince.com/TWS for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. SMALLS -  For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to https://Smalls.com/TWS. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive a Tim Horton's scholarship award. Ready for what's next? Apply today at careers.timhorans.ca. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. We are back. My name is John Stewart.

We were off for a week and we are refreshed and healthy and ready to roll on this Tuesday, June 2nd. It'll probably air on June 3rd. I'm still waiting to see if I'm going to get booked to open. for Freedom 250 right before Flo Rida which is that poor I don't know if you guys saw that the CNC Music Factory guy gave what maybe

I think one of the great I don't want to say Gettysburg Address but he gave one of the great speeches while sitting on his toilet about how he views the type of performances that may be going on in D.C. And I just I can't urge you enough to find it

online and watch it through because it rolls through his feelings of performing in front of, let's say, the dictator of North Korea whilst drinking wine from Venezuela and smoking Cuban cigars, it's something. And for some reason, he is maybe one of my favorite people in the world right now, given that speech. But today's show, we're going to go in a slightly different direction. We're going to talk to one of my favorite sort of utility players in the world of breaking down all the different events and threats that may be looming on our horizon. He's an existentialist, as you could tell from the title of his bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth, life after warming. But he's recently, I've just really enjoyed a lot of his columns that

range on a variety of topics from the Middle East to AI to all those different things. So I haven't talked to him in a little while, and I'm excited to talk to him again. Let's just bring them on in. David Wallace Wells is joining us today. David Wallace Wells, one of my favorite writers, writer for the New York Times opinion, columnist, New York Times Magazine, author of the bestseller of the Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, but you have been expanding, David, your writing platforms. So here's what we're going to do today.

this is our task for today David tell me I was convinced that you thought global warming was the existential threat to humankind I now believe David Wallace Wallis and you can tell me if this is true or not that you've expanded your extinction events into AI or perhaps the Middle East so today we are going to go through

where you believe our fatal mistake will come from and destroy the entirety of the planet, are you still in the mindset that in your hierarchy of extinction events is, is climate still the top of the list? Or are you finding other existential threats underneath it that you want to explore? You know, I wouldn't call any of these things extinction events, actually. I think, you know, no matter what happens, there are going to be billions of people living on the planet, probably most of them living relatively normal lives.

But I do think we have a bundle of existential challenges in the sense of challenges that are revealing the meaning of our existence. And I'm still pretty worried about warming. We could talk about that. But there are some near term challenges too, which may be looming a bit larger for, you know, your listeners. Let's do that.

Let's, first of all, thank you for saying we have listeners. That's meaningful. Let me, let me, all right, so we'll start with that. We'll start with near-term challenges, and then we'll go to the long-term challenges. So let's pop in with near-term challenges. Who's in the poll position for near-term challenges for humankind? Well, we're dealing with a war in the Middle East that was needless and elective, and I think really poorly conceived, and which has scrambled an awful lot of geopolitics

and done a lot of damage to America's standing in the world and made the future seem a whole lot more, a whole lot less stable than it did even a year ago when we still had Donald Trump in office. But, you know, we weren't having an oil and gas supply crisis. We weren't having a fertilizer crisis on the onset of growing season. We weren't having shortages of, you know, aluminum to make Diet Coke cans and helium to run MRI machines and, you know, plastics to make condoms to deliver to the developing world. So I think that, you know, over the last six months, that's the thing that has introduced itself most dramatically. The warner-on, totally needless in my view, totally ill-defined, and I think catastrophic and revealing on a number of different levels. Let me, let's tease that a part a little bit.

Is that, that's interesting to me. It felt like the world has always had problems, but there was a relative amount of stability. it seems very clear that in the last few years, and maybe we'll start it with Russia's invasion of Ukraine or maybe even their occupation of Crimea, that the world order was about to go through a bit of a reset, that we were going to be re-chewing who are the allied powers

and who are the access powers. And is America aligning with the access powers? Are we, is that what this Iran war represents? I mean, you know, that famous skit from some British comedy show where it's like two Nazi soldiers looking at each other and going, are we the baddies? I do think, you know, I don't want to underestimate the villainy of Iran. That regime has been brutal for many decades. It is certainly not a place that I would want to live. I think very few Americans would want to live there.

But that's not the same thing as saying that bad behavior justifies regular military action against essentially non-existent nuclear threats, in my view. And especially so poorly thought through that now the result of this conflict has been, I think, a pretty clear humiliation for the American military and a pretty clear elevation in global status for Iran, not to mention, you know, the entire. global economy being put into a kind of a vice, such that we're all now, all eight billion of us on the planet dependent on, you know, these two kind of madmen, one of whom is running America and or many more than one running around. But I'm coming to some kind of rational

conclusion and rational exit from this conflict, which is sort of hard to imagine or to the extent that we can imagine it, it's not going to solve all the problems that the conflict itself caused. And do you think that the conflict, you know, I'm always interested in what country's misbehavior rises to the level of intervention. You know, Russia's behavior, invading countries, threatening Europe with energy shortages, all these other things, that rises to the level of, well, maybe we'll help the people under attack with some money in some missiles. But Iran's behavior, that we must intervene there immediately.

Israel's behavior of bombing, not only do we not intervene, we give them the materials to do it. Saudi Arabia, their behavior can be abhorrent in the human rights arena. There are allies. It's very hard to find a consistent through line morally. Well, I mean, I don't think that this administration is applying a moral test at all. I think the purpose of this war wasn't even strategic. I don't even think, you know, they now are telling us that the goal of this war was to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons program, which, you know, everyone who looked at that closely said had been badly damaged in the attacks last year, was pretty far from posing an imminent threat. I think you have to look at this not as a strategic choice by the Trump administration, but an effort to project power without responsibility.

And that's basically a through line that I think you've seen through the second Trump administration. You know, we had this big document that they put together, the Pentagon, which declared that thing, you know, the Don Roe doctrine, which a lot of people interpreted as a, as this, you know, a kind of plan to, for America to retreat from its rivalry with China in particular and focus on dominating the Western Hemisphere. But I think that's a little bit of a misreading. And when you look at, you know, what we did in Venezuela, what we've done in the Caribbean, what we're now doing in Iran, I think that's a little bit of a misreading. I think that Trump basically just wants to play the role of a 19th century imperial power where he gets to do what he wants. He doesn't have to own any of the damage that he creates elsewhere. And he mostly wants the rest of the world to kind of cower and fear intimidated by us. And that's why the Iran War is such a significant event because even a week beforehand, most military analysts would have said,

this is probably strategically unwise, but the U.S. is going to absolutely, but the U.S. is going to absolutely destroy Iran in this conflict. You know, what it would lead to, who knows, whether it unleashes chaos in the region, who knows, but this is going to be an obvious American show of dominance. And we have done a lot of damage to their military facilities. We've also, you know, killed some schoolgirls and done damage to a lot of civilian infrastructure hospitals and universities in ways that used to be casually called, you know, war crimes. Yes, casually.

But the actual like military conflict has not been in any meaningful way won by the United States. In fact, I think you'd have to say that it's been lost, if anything. We are now in a weaker bargaining position than we were when it started. Iran has demonstrated its power and control over one of the central economic pathways in the world, the Strait of Hormuz. And they've done that in a way that tells a lot of really interesting stories about the near term, you know, geopolitics. in an age of an energy transition, in an age of drone warfare, and in an age of declining American power. I think this is really, really significant. When you look at what happened not just what's happened not just in Iran, but what has happened in Ukraine over the last few years,

and indeed what happened when the U.S. tried to go to war with the Houthis last year, we've seen a complete rewriting of the script of conflicts involving superpowers and lesser powers. You know, we used to think, okay, maybe the U.S. will bungle its way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but like we can be clear that the military advantage there lies with the superpower. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it looked somewhat similar, but Ukraine was able to respond by essentially standing up an entirely new drone infrastructure, drone production system that then changed the logic of war and has allowed them to at least fight the Russians to a standstill. and then over the last year actually regained territory from the Russians. This is a completely new kind of war.

In Ukraine, 70 to 80 percent of casualties are now the result of drones, not soldiers. They've had a number of episodes where one army or the other has taken a position exclusively with robots and drones. And we're now seeing something similar play out in Iran, which is in which, you know, Americans may be able to shoot down an Iranian drone, but it's going to cost us, you know, a $20 million missile. and that drone might have cost them $10,000, which means they just have an incredible natural advantage. And what that means going forward, I think, is really complicated. If we had all assumed a few years ago that, you know, superpowers may value the life of their soldiers so highly that they were reluctant to get into war. But if they got into war, they would really kick ass. Now we're in a situation where it's not even clear that in conflict between the world's most powerful militaries and obviously lesser adversaries that the powerful militaries have a meaningful advantage.

And that opens up huge questions about America's rivalry with China, about our standing in the world, et cetera. But David, how in God's name have we not learned that over, you know? Over the last 30 years. Forget about the last 30 years. The last 70 years since World War II, you know, I think back to Vietnam. And the big lesson of Vietnam was it doesn't matter. You can carpet bomb a country. You can napalm it.

You can destroy the village to save the village. You have the military advantage. But when a country is fighting for its own territory, its own sovereignty, you don't necessarily have an advantage if you are the invader or the occupier, even if you have a military that has tremendous superiority, what you were just saying about Iran, forget about drones. Obviously, that was a different technology. They would say about tunnels or that, you know,

tunnels are the new way of fighting warfare that humble the great superpowers. Vietnam was the lesson that should have humbled us in terms of the way that we deploy our military. And for a moment it did. And then we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in, you know, a few weeks. And then we invaded in a few days. And we thought, oh, we're back.

How is it that we don't learn that lesson? Well, we told ourselves in that period that we had found a technological solution to the problem of Vietnam, which is that we were going to fight wars remotely. We were going to fight them from the sky with targeted smart bombs. And we were going to deploy soldiers on the war. the ground to the extent that it was necessary only after we had completely obliterated the enemy. And we did that. It was in some cases somewhat successful and other cases less successful, but it never really achieved the strategic aims of those wars. This is something that

the scholar Robert Pape has really emphasized that we can make shows of dominance through air power. But if we really wanted to effectuate change on the ground, we're just as, we have just as hard a time in the 90s and 2000s as we did in the 60s and 50s. But we told ourselves that whole time that we were that we were kicking ass. We told ourselves that we kicked us in Iraq. We told ourselves that we kicked us in Iraq the second time. We told ourselves that we kicked us in Libya. And that was just a story we told ourselves to pump ourselves up to make ourselves feel more powerful than we really were and more consequential than we really were on the global stage.

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Right. And the way that I would illustrate that is to say, you know, not that long ago, 15 years ago, during the Obama drone wars, when America assassinated, on Ola O'Aki via drone, it was like this incredible, you know, I felt myself pulled into the science fiction future in which there's this global superpower maintaining total global surveillance such that we could track an individual bad actor on the other side of the world

and then go and find him with flying robots that then killed him. That seemed like we had just discovered the death star as America, as America. Now, whether that meant that we could Did we, I'm just curious, did we watch the end of that movie? Because I don't know if people know. You do have to ask those questions about a lot of these military people. Do they stay in the theater till the final credits roll and see what exactly happened to the death? Yeah. Well, I mean, to your point, I thought the movie series was obviously a Vietnam allegory.

Right. But, you know, even five or eight years ago, military futurists would think of American technological advantage is something that just could not be overcome by a lesser adversary. And then we saw it happen very rapidly. You know, it's not just that the cost of these drones are so cheap. And what they allow any country with any meaningful industrial base to do is to compete on an equal level with, like, the world's most expensive, largest military. And I do think that, you know, this is something that we're finally waking up to now because I think most Americans look at what's happening in Iran and see it clearly. whatever they're hearing on Fox News or whatever, see it clearly as a setback.

See, I think that Americans don't. I think Americans, if you look at it through the prisms of how Americans view it, there are all kinds of narratives that are coming out of this. One of the most powerful ones politically now has nothing to do with the kind of Icarus theory that we're talking about, which is we continue to think, oh, you know what, if I just have the right wax, I can fly as close to the sun as I want. You know, every time you think, all right, we'll change, we'll figure out a way to level the playing field on drones and we can go back to flying next to the sun. But if you think about the narratives now, the narratives now are much more defined through the kind of populist demagogue lens that we're seeing now.

If we just get rid of Israel, we won't have any of these problems anymore because it's really their influence. or if we just get rid of immigrants, we won't have these kinds of problems anymore. It's an elimination theory rather than a coherent theory of you can have influence in this world, but you cannot control it. And attempts to control it

will inevitably lead to you plunging into the sea when the wax melts off your feathers. And I think that's where we're heading over the next few months. I mean, it's a little hard to know exactly what the consequences will be in part because, you know, we had a lot of warnings right at the beginning of the war about the economic fallout. Most of the smart people said that pain was going to really hit within four or six weeks,

and here we are now three months later. And there are consequences for the U.S. and bigger consequences elsewhere in the world. But it's not like we're, you know, living through the depths of the COVID recession right now or anything like that. But the smart people now tell us that we have about, you know, we managed to extend that timeline because we drew down our oil and gas reserves because. around the world, we've found ways to sort of maybe cut 10% of global fossil demand. But now we're about to hit the point where, you know, the shit really hits the fan.

And that may be a whole new phase of this conflict than we've encountered before. And that I think is also really important, which is another thing that's changed in this conflict is that we used to think of, like, sanctions and trade war as something that we did to avoid hot conflict. it was a lesser escalatory choice, which might eventually graduate to a hot war. And this conflict is really interesting because the real fight is not military. The real fight is economic. It's like, who is controlling, who's got the hostage? Right, right, right. And who's suffering most from the holding of the hostage? And like the occasional sorties and bombing, I would like that to stop. But it doesn't feel to me like the ceasefire periods that we've been in are,

in any meaningful way, preferable to the global order, versus the hot conflict periods of this war that we've had. It's actually, the main fight is about the economy. And I wonder if that's also a sign of where we're heading. See, you just, here's where this is just blowing my mind out. See, now we're going to take it back to it. When I think about your writing on climate, I always think about when you talk about the real victims of the climate being those that live sub-economically, from every they're the ones that that suffer the most and in some ways it's one of the reasons we don't address it in the manner in which maybe we should is that there seems to be a kind of and by the way the police are coming to take david walswells away i don't know where he moved to

not for you john but it is not no i'm in jersey baby we don't even have cops it's all it's it's it's nirvana uh when you talk about the economic we're all waiting for the economic damage to hit, but isn't there a certain plane of existence now in the stock market and with the AI Titans and with the upper middle class that actually gas could be $5, $6, and they wouldn't feel that pain. But there is a level of economic pain in America

that is just now endemic, that the 50%, 60% 70% of the people that are just living through these squeezes and it's just life, that the people that make the decisions on Iran and AI and climate don't actually ever feel that economic pain. And so why would they change course? It's almost the opposite, right? I mean, in this particular case, in the future, things won't be quite as corrupt one hopes.

But in this particular case, the Trump administration has been making announcements and decisions about this war. It seems basically based on like they're looking at their Bloomberg terminal. And they see that terminal as the entire expanse of the universe. So if they make an announcement and prices go up, their friends profit, sometimes literally criminally through insider trading, in other cases just, you know, in the normal course of corruption. And his kids get a drone contract at the Pentagon. Yeah. And then they make another announcement and the market moves.

direction and a different set of friends of there's benefit. And there's very, very little appreciation for the real world economic consequences. But the truth is, the market is to some degree also operating that way in the sense that, you know, we have had an enormous blow to global oil and gas supplies. Right. And the market has not, I mean, they've responded, the market has responded, but it hasn't responded nearly as dramatically as most analysts expected it to. They've found ways to find new supply, but they've also just kind of continually bet on the possibility that this is a short-term disruption that will be smoothed out in the long run. And so you haven't had the, you know, the total turmoil in the markets that one might have expected at the outset. And I do think that

you're exactly right. There's a, there's a kind of global story playing out in which, you know, the nations of Asia, which were hit first and hardest by this shortage of fuel, they've undertaken some incredible emergency measures. They've, you know, shortened their work. work weeks, they've closed schools, they've imposed restrictions on fuel use. In the countries of Europe and the U.S., we're now paying a little bit more for gas and maybe for some other products we buy at the supermarket, but it hasn't been all that catastrophic. And yet, even here, where we're relatively insulated, you know, there's huge gradations between who's suffering more as a result and who really could price these changes in without noticing. And I think that

you're exactly right. I mean, in the global, I don't mean the global, you know, the planet. I mean, global American context, the scale of the, you know, the scale and shape of the economy, I do think that the fundamental fact of this, of the present is this incredibly intense inequality, which is growing year on year and in some quite, you know, remarkable ways, especially at the very, very top. And we see all of these plutocrats and oligarchs every day on our TV screens, every day on their podcast and in their panel conferences, is talking about the future of humanity, talking maybe particularly about how AI is going to change everything, but also about economic policy, also about the war.

And these are people who are just living in an entirely different universe than not just the bottom 50 percent, you know, the bottom 95 percent. Yes. Not to mention the bottom 50 percent who are also living in a completely different universe. Right. And I think that's one of the things that is behind the sort of growing AI backlash is this intuition that this is a technology and a world historical force that is being designed by a small handful of people, literally five people, and a huge amount of the world's wealth is being channeled

in their direction and the shape of our collective future is being written in part by those, in large part, by those five people. And for anyone who spent the last decade worrying about not just the concentration of wealth, but the concentration of social power that follows from that wealth. That is an incredibly concerning acceleration of preexisting trends, which even in their earlier phase have caused a huge amount of political turmoil and widespread suffering. The people at the top are always somewhat insulated from the pain that some of their decision making, the effects, the literal effects of their policies on the people whose lives are affected through those policies. I don't recall a time when the distance between those two

has ever been this large. And I think your point about AI is a really great one because that's just going to accelerate it in a way that we haven't seen before. What is your thought process on when the world that the grand designers and decision makers is so removed from the day-to-day experience of the people,

vast majority, the 90% of people, the 95% of people that those decisions will impact, what's the, where's the cracking point? You know, you got Trump out there saying like, hey, people's financial decisions, that doesn't play into this. I'm, he's just, he's, they've invented a story that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon and drop it on people. Meanwhile, North Korea has a nuclear weapon. Pakistan has a nuclear weapon. Like, nuclear weaponry and the technology that surrounds it is going to be more accessible to smaller and smaller countries.

That's just a fact. And one of the messages of this war is like you should get over the finish line if you're developing a nuke. Let's hurry. Because then you're protected. Right. So when did they,

it's not just a board game of risk. When did they start feeling the pressure from below? Or will they ever? Well, I think, you know, different actors here are in different positions. So I think the Trump administration is operating in a very different world than like the AI plutocrats. I think that the Trump administration feels that they have their, you know, 90 plus percent of their self-identified MAGA Republicans are on board with everything. I think Trump basically only looks at that polling.

He doesn't look at polling of the country as a whole, which is one reason why he keeps telling interviewers that he's got such support that nobody else seems to credit. And I think that they're quite comfortable, you know, ruining the country by stripping it for parts and enriching themselves, whatever the political consequences. I mean, that is the Trump MO and has been for 50 years. You know, that's how he operates and that's how he's operating now, now that he's been sort of empowered and without, you know, the sort of limited oversight that there wasn't the first term. The AI guys, you know, first of all, they're kind of ideologically. diverse. Some of them are libertarian and some of them are libertarian fascists. Is that the ideological diversity in that world? I think that Dario Modai is genuinely a liberal who is trying to figure out how to square his own, you know, the sort of the market logic of his company with his own set of values. And I think he's going through a very public reckoning with that.

And the purpose of AI with his values. Totally. Yeah. But, you know, 10 years ago, all of these founders were obsessed with existential risk. They thought that AI was going to, there was some chance that AI was going to bring about the near-term extinction of humanity. There's some surveys that show that there's still a relatively significant share of AI engineers who believe this is a real possibility. But the guys who were really in charge have kind of moved on. They've stopped talking about existential risk.

They've stopped talking about bio risk. Sure. And they've started to now over the last year in particular really focus on what I think the public is most anxious about, which is, you know, disruption to employment patterns. Right. Political, you know, political concentration of power. And they don't exactly have a set of, I think, serious proposals for how to deal with those possibilities. But they are at least signaling or trying to signal that they hear the public's anxiety. and that they want to be seen as people of conscience on these questions.

Seen as. Seen as people of conscience. Not people of conscience. Not actual. Yeah. No, I mean, I think one big part of this story is that it's not just them. It's all the rest of us, too. It's not clear, like, how much faith we should have in our ability to exercise democratic control over these forces.

You know, I was just reading the Pope's encyclical about AI and thinking. and thinking about the fact that 30 years ago, when the first sheep was cloned, the Catholic Church came out and said, we're not going to do human cloning. And they weren't alone. There were a lot of other people who said the same thing, you know, from on the right and on the left. But there was able to be a kind of social consensus built that this arc of progress actually could be stopped and must be stopped and would be stopped. And it was stopped. We haven't cloned humans in the 30 years since. Right. Now, it's not an exact parallel, but when Pope Leo comes out with his encyclical against AI now, it's like, do we have any hope of taking control of these systems? Our friends of quints are back to help fashion plates like myself and like my audience. Upgrade your summer wardrobe. You know, I can't always wear couture, if that's what they call like. Hot couture. Hot couture. I can't always wear that. I'm not always at a ball.

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The whole point of AI is it's training itself on the entirety of human existence. And yet they get to put it all behind proprietary walls. And we don't see either a shareholder. or anything about it. In fact, we have to pay them for the privilege. Yeah, my boss, A.G. Sultzbury, the publisher of the Times, just had a great speech about this, and he's making a big stand on this front, too. But, you know, when I think about the Bernie proposal, I also worry that we're essentially affirming the monopolistic structure of this system if we're saying that the U.S. government is going to take a 50% stake in the leading AI labs.

Just give us a cut and we'll let it go. And that means that the U.S. government will then be invested in the stability of that system in which, for instance, anthropic or maybe open AI is dominating this whole field. And maybe that is the natural course of the technology that it trends towards monopolistic structures. But I would bet all do. Well, I mean, I would say. I mean, every time you have an advance in terms of communications or science or thing, people tend to try and corner the market on it because so much money pours into the first few people that develop it. And then they, They use that money to pull ladders up from everywhere else.

They use it to feed into the political system. I mean, it's a well-worn, you know, the industrialists of the early 1900s did the same thing. I agree. I think that's something that's happening in which we need to worry about. But I wonder if there's also something else, another thread here to pick up on, which is, you know, what AI people call diffusion. And that is, you know, the bet of these big frontier labs is that it's so important. to be the best, that we should leverage all of this capital and all of these resources and, you know, risk antagonizing the American public in order to be a little bit better than the next

best guy because there's so many large returns to being number one. But I wonder just how true that is. If you have AI progressing so rapidly that an open source model from China or elsewhere that is 80% as good as the frontier model at 10% of the cost, there are going to be a huge number of people who find that valuable. Maybe not the absolute cutting edge cancer researchers or the people in the Pentagon. But for the average person doing like, you know, research on what stocks to invest in or where to go on vacation, they don't actually need, you know, the absolute cutting edge frontier model. They can use one from six months ago and be totally fine. And in that landscape, I wonder just how large the returns to dominance really are.

That's interesting. And whether the natural structure may actually advantage smaller, more nimble. And that's basically, by the way, the bet that China is making on AI. Right. They are focused on making sure that every person in every job can use this tool well. Utility. They're making it about utility and developing. And uptake.

Usage. Right. The other bet they're making that is seemingly much smarter than us, is they're making a bet on electrification and on the fact that this is going to be an enormous, they're already setting aside land for these data centers and water and to electrify their grid so that because that's really going to be the challenge is,

you know, these AI companies, they can corner the market all they want. If they run out of tokens and power, they're done. It doesn't matter if it's model 8.9178 clod or 10.135 clawed. Like, you don't have the power, you don't have the model. I mean, maybe 18 months ago or so, I wrote a piece in which I said, like, the U.S. is betting on AI and China's betting on green tech.

And, you know, these were like the two, they were the bets for their century. And you pointed out the silliness of that, which is that AI also depends on electricity. Right. And we need abundant cheap, you know, available electricity. Clean energy is the fastest, cheapest way to do that. And America is not only not embracing that technology, they're doing a lot of stuff to slow its rollout, somewhat ineffectively. But the policy direction is against clean energy rather than for it. And in China, you know, they're not, you know, they're still building coal plants.

They're still, you know, producing emissions. I don't want to make them seem like a perfect hero here. But especially in the context of the Iran War, which is where we started this conversation, the entire world is now looking out and realizing that clean energy is cheaper, that it is. more reliable because it doesn't, it's not subject to oil shocks and it is not subject to hostage taking by the world's malevolent actors. Right. And it is domestically sourced once you build the infrastructure so that, yes, you have to import some solar panels and stuff.

But once you do that, the sun keeps shining in your country. And the whole world is responding to this crisis as they did really, the last crisis with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, by dramatically increasing their. green electrification programs and importing much, much more green tech, particularly from China. So, you know, we have since this war, everybody predicted that it would produce a surge in coal. It hasn't happened. Instead, we've seen a huge surge in the purchasing of Chinese solar panels of EVs all around the world. Oh, China's killing it.

China's killing it right now. This war has absolutely heightened the need for their cars and their solar technology. we're all sitting around. It makes me think in America, and it kind of gets us back to the Vietnam of it all. But the last time I remember this was the 1970s. That was the oil shock when OPEC finally realized, you know what, we actually have some power over these Western societies who have such a huge need for our delicious energy that we can consolidate that into OPEC. And we can start to have some control here and not just be and this war feels like a kind of throwback to the analog world that we were living in back then it's about oil and nuclear power when everyone else is moving into that

next century of AI and electrification yeah i mean the the biggest irony there is that it may be the end of opec right it may it may destroy it and and also scramble all of these alliances that the Trump administration has spent so much time building over the last decade, you know, trying to build a sort of a coalition of countries around basically venture capital and tech capital in the Gulf and many of those countries. Well, that's why. It's always so funny. He sends Jared and Whitkov over there. And their plan is always like, what if we just get $200 billion to build like a golf course in some hotels in Tehran? Would that be good for you guys? Like, well, this is, I think, one of the underrated

consequences of this war is that a lot of that money is actually drying up. And, you know, Saudi Arabia is not for him, though, not for Kushner. I mean, not, not for the Trump family in particular, but the Gulf, the Gulf sovereign wealth funds are reconsidering their investments around the world. They are, a lot of stuff has already been withdrawn and canceled. That's why you're seeing, you know, problems for, you know, the, the golf stuff. And they cancel their No more money for Mickelson now that this war started. But those were basically efforts to court power, Western alliances and Western power. And they're reconsidering those in the response to this war because even the allies, even Trump's allies in the Middle East who have benefited from these deals over the last decade and have been scrambling to push more money in that direction.

even they see the lesson of this war as America is no longer a reliable partner. They are fickle. They are punitive. And they're just not, it doesn't make sense to put all of our, you know, all of our chips in that basket. Well, they were also, you know, what they were, their vision for the future in the Middle East was a future. We are the cities of the future. We are going to build these. We're going to put islands where islands didn't exist anymore.

we're going to build these incredible buildings, it's going to be a place of leisure and technology and all these different things. But the one thing that it requires, not just energy, is stability. And peace. And if you're in a volatile region of the world and suddenly drones are hitting in the middle of Doha, well, suddenly it all looks like a fiction and it collapses on itself. Even more than that, the country that they depended on to guarantee. their peace is the country that is attacking them. Wow. No, that's that's really true. And it brings up to get back to the existential part of this. The through line here is, is it that humans can't help themselves? And I know that's sort of,

you know, I think you think on a more philosophical level. And so as we go through all these, you mentioned cloning before and that we were able to stop ourselves from cloning people. A, I'm not sure we have. Like, you don't really know what they're doing in the CRISPR, but there's also, there's not a huge public utility to that that we can see. AI is different. Yeah, that's true. Is the through line through all of this that in truth,

even when faced with catastrophic results on the horizon from our actions, that we can't help ourselves, that if it's there to be made, we'll make it. That is Trump's philosophical claim. Yes, that's what I'm saying. And we are living in a world now in which many other actors beyond Trump are behaving in parallel ways. Right. This is not just a problem of who is president. There are many leaders in the world who have become considerably more self-interested, amoral, acquisitive in their approach to world affairs.

That is true, and I think it is depressing and distressing. But I also think it's not the sum total here. It wasn't that long ago when, you know, 2014, 2015, 2016, just to use, you know, the climate story as a kind of illustrative example. It wasn't that long ago that the world's two great powers, the U.S. and China, got together. And even before the incredible declines in clean energy made electrification an obvious economic win, even before that, the U.S. and China said, we really have to get together and do something about climate. And that's the result of that negotiation was effectively the Paris Accords, which was a global agreement in which all countries of the world said that

which we yonked out of as soon as we. Well, I mean, it's not just that, though. It's, you know, we've yanked out of so many things. But, you know, 10 years ago, we were, the UN was saying, okay, the millennium development goals that we had put forward in the late 90s were so successful. We had pulled so many people out of poverty. We had driven child mortality down so much that we now need to come up with an entirely different set of goals for 2030.

And they did that. And the whole world was very excited about making those real. Right, right. You know, we were just in general imagining a more cooperative future, which to the paranoid looked like a kind of the arrival of a global governance structure, which maybe they found unlikable. But even so, the trend of history seemed to be more towards integration through globalization, but also through, you know, cooperation. Cooperation. All those things were ascendant. Ten years ago is not that long ago.

And we've now lived through a decade or a decade plus of break from that. pattern, but I don't want to forget that it wasn't that long ago that we were on that track. And it wasn't such a different world materially, economically. And I do think in one perverse way, you know, the lesson of the Donald Trump years is, like, those of us who diminished the Great Man Theory of History and elevated structural explanations for how things progressed have really missed out because small changes in electorates producing particular personalities in particular places can meaningfully change the entire course of planetary history. That's what we've seen in the U.S. and it's quite depressing.

But it also means that you get a different set of people in there and things could be quite different. And I do think that there are... That's certainly more optimistic. I mean, but it also says maybe there's a theory that, you know, whether it is globalization or climate, that leaders have to be more cognizant of the collateral debt. damage of progress and that if you ignore that that collateral damage. So and this can apply to climate or AI or anything else. If you ignore it, you risk what we're seeing now, which is the political

backlash to that. So let's go back to your, you know, 10 years ago or 20 years ago and China's in the WTO and we start forming these more global organizations. But then a climate tax is levied that hurts French farmers and truckers. And so they suddenly have a huge protest and it leads to a kind of rejuvenation of that populist right all through Europe, as well as our interventions in these other places that lead to the immigrant crisis and migrant crisis in Europe and in the United States, which leads again to that populist right-wing backlash. Is the left, is liberal world value, not cognizant enough of the unforeseen consequences of what progress can look like. You know, we talk about Trump and them, they live in ivory towers and they don't feel the

effects of this, is the left have a blind spot as well in that. And if we had covered it better, is it possible we wouldn't be facing this backlash? Yeah, I mean, I think in the American context, I think a lot about the moment in late 2008, early 2009, when Larry Summers solicited a bunch of proposals for how much stimulus to ask Congress for. And Lail Braynard proposed, I think, $1.5 trillion. That was how big she said the gap between where we needed to be and where we were was. and the government needed to fill that gap with $1.5 trillion in spending. And Summers looked at that and was like,

we can't even present this to Obama because there's no way we're going to get more than a trillion. Let's ask for a trillion and we'll negotiate down from there. And he did that. And the stimulus was, I think, $800 billion. And who knows how the alternate history would have unfolded if that $1.5 trillion estimate had actually made its way to Obama's desk? Who knows whether it would have made it through Congress. Who knows?

Who knows? But if we had found a way politically to deliver double the stimulus that we had, I think we'd be living in a very different place in America politically than we were than we are now and with considerably less suffering and considerably less turmoil. And that's not to say that it would have solved all the problems of the China shock in the industrial Midwest. And it's not to say that there wouldn't have been backlash against migration, which by the way, I think has many causes, global causes. that most Americans don't appreciate because, you know, the big surge in 21, 22, we saw the same surge in Canada. We saw the same surge in the UK. We saw the same surge in the EU. Every rich country in the world had a huge migration surge coming out of the pandemic. And we tell ourselves that it was about Biden's indifference to the border, probably that contributed, but there's a

bigger story there, too. That's a separate point. More specifically, I do think that considerably more could have been done over the last 20 years to soften the jagged edges of all of these changes. And I think it's quite striking and scary that we seem to be heading into a similar transformation, a parallel transformation to globalization in the form of AI without anything, like even the things that we tried to build into our response 15 or 20 years ago, when at least we talked about, you know, retraining industrial workers and, you know, and we're not doing that now with AI at all. And I personally don't know. how big an impact AI will be for employment over the next two or five years.

I think it's more of an open question than many people suggest. But if we take seriously the high-end projections of how much turmoil and disruption it could cause, we need to be doing dramatically more to respond to the fallout. Yes. Now, on the other side of that, though, there's a debate within the party about whether we're, we've become too much, we're too safetyist, and we're too worried about technological change. and then we need to enable transformation of our economy. We need to build more.

We need to impose fewer union regulations on our technological change. And so there's kind of a natural conflict in the coalition, which I think we're skating towards the midterms, acting as though we don't need to resolve that. And maybe that's a bad bargain. Maybe we really do need to resolve that in the favor of one side or the other. I know a little secret about a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast. Yes, you like animals. I'm just going to say many of you like cats. And cats are delightful.

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and it also has to solve racism and hiring, and it also has to solve, you know, the way that women make less money in the workplace. So we'll put in all kinds of barriers and ultimately don't get to build things. What we don't seem to do well in this country is actively manage these processes for where the collateral damage is occurring. We're really good at putting up a ton of barriers that bureaucratic cost a shit ton of money and waste a shit ton of time. Because you were talking about earlier, which I thought was a great point,

these inflection points where we always have like the 2008 financial crisis where in hindsight, geez, maybe helping out only the financial institutions and not homeowners was a mistake and create, oh, maybe letting China into the WTO and flooding all Western markets with cheap goods, you know, people. that are making a lot less money, taking jobs from people in the Midwest, wasn't a good idea. Rather than front-loading obstacles, maybe the answer is more actively managing the collateral damage of that through the things that you're talking about, like stimulus, right? And this is a theory of government that I have, which is, I think government has made it

so that it has an adversarial relationship with the people it purports to help. It's built on the idea that we have to guard against fraud. And so if we treat everybody like they're ripping us off, that will keep the 3% of people that were going to rip us off from doing it. It'd be much cheaper and I think much smarter to treat those programs

like they're designed for people to access them. and beef up fraud and enforcement on the back end, which is cheaper, make the penalties much higher. It's a long-winded of saying is, I think we need to change the theory of government. Does that make sense? We did do some of that during COVID, right? I mean, we basically let people cheat the government left and right as a cost of getting the money out the door more quickly and more seamlessly. But what did it do differently than in 2008? it saved people's lives and homes.

Yeah. And Larry Summers fucking hated it. Maybe not for that reason, but that's what I'm talking about. But Summers is also illustrative. I mean, he's illustrative of some things that are wrong with our world in our country. But, you know, one of the things is that I think, you know, liberalism in America, liberals in America really do believe at their core that the world is legible. they can understand tradeoffs quite clearly and make judgments from on high, which they then pass down to the public. I mean, that is to me one of the real, you know, that story I just retold about Lail Braynard and Larry Summers.

Like, Larry Summers is like, I am going to decide what the right amount of stimulus is. And I'm going to give that to President Barack Obama and he's going to give it to Congress and then it's going to be implemented. And he wasn't just making a perfect technocratic calculation. Actually, Lail Brannard was the one who made the perfect technocratic calculation. What Summers was doing was saying, I cannot just understand the gap in this economy. I can also understand the political reality. And I can incorporate those two considerations as though they are different inputs in a spreadsheet and tell you the perfect answer.

And avoid his proposition, I'm going to avoid the ideological conflict around the size of this stimulus by simply spitting out the right answer ahead of time. I found it really striking to bring it back to the present. In this wave of debate and conversation among the AI leaders, I saw an interview with Dario Amoda recently where he said on this very point, I do not think that ideology can survive the arrival of this technology. Because machines will know what the optimal distribution of resources will be. be. They will tell us that. We won't have to fight over it. We will have the answer. And this is a

profound misunderstanding of political conflict and human psychology and human nature. You know, conservatives always, always yell at liberals and say, you don't understand human nature. Everybody's acquisitive and market oriented. My view is like, you, you, you know, you plutocrats don't understand human nature. You can't simply run the entire world like you run a factory floor room. You have people fighting, and that fight is inherent to the process of human life and human growth. And if you try to navigate around it, you're only going to produce more backlash. And no matter what it is, whether it's AI or whether it's anything else, and I'm sorry, a computer can optimize it as best it wants. It doesn't know what it doesn't know.

We don't know as people what we don't know. And that's the theory of the case that I think we're missing in terms of governance. that what you just described about Larry Summer saying, I went through the spreadsheet and I came up with the answer. And now that I have the answer, we can move forward. As opposed to saying, here's what I think the answer might be. Let's introduce it into the system. But be prepared to change if we see that the unforeseen consequences of introducing this

go in a direction that we did not foresee, or if the consequences of introducing it turn more negative than what we thought, and we have to be more active in managing those consequences, and we're not. I think that's the blind spot of that type of thinking is, I figured it all out on paper beforehand, put it into the system,

and let's all sit back and go work on a different thing. I mean, I think that there is a huge cultural blind spot, particularly among liberals on that front. But I also think that there's a huge, when you think about it as a matter of state capacity, it's like, and social trust, you know, if we're imagining a world in which we are not in one fell swoop, you know, issuing a huge set of, for instance, new AI regulations, but responding in real time with different kinds of attentive stimulus packages and retraining programs. Yes.

But that requires a huge amount of new state capacity. and social trust to make that happen. Not state capacity, though, David, utilization of capacity that exists. The capacity, I don't think it's a capacity problem. It's a distribution problem. It's a read and react problem. Don't you think we have the capacity?

I just look at the way that the government has functioned over the last 20 years, and I see very little that gives me faith that we could be nimble and responsive You know, we've gotten some big things done. You know, like I do think that a lot of the stuff that came out of the financial crisis was good and significant. I think health care was good and significant, imperfect, but good and significant. I do think a lot of the stuff that we did, you know, in the COVID stimulus was, again, imperfect, but good and significant and, you know, in certain ways remarkably effective.

And I do think that the IRA and build back better, though they've been, you know, undermined by Trump were also really quite significant. But I don't see a pattern of real-time responsive governance. I see people acting in fear of the next administration trying to get everything done and banking progress so that nobody could mess with it. And that is a appropriate intuition about the shape of governance and politics in our country where, you know, every piece of legislation is only, you know, we can only trust will last as long as the next election. And in that context, can we really imagine designing a more responsive, you know, social welfare state to deal with more significant changes coming? Yes. I'm not sure. Yes.

I would like to believe so. I say yes, David, because that's – so opportunity lies in those gaps. The gap that we're describing is not a place for fatalism, but a place of opportunity. What we're describing about here is something in the system that is missing, that is not functioning correctly, that is not responsive or agile to those needs. What I'm saying is we have a factory that has capacity and can be retooled to function in a way, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence tools that allow us to be more agile and responsive. and that I think for the left, that's where the opportunity is for a new, new deal. Not the old new deal that has necessarily building these large sort of maginal lines that protect against social safety consequences, which I think is absolutely necessary.

But the ideal is to build that machine in a way that is more coherent to the way people live today. And I think not only can it be done, it must be done. I'm with you, and I also think that here in New York, you know, Zoroamam Dani's mayoralty is a perfect illustration of this value set. Yes. And he's an obviously ideological actor. I share a lot of his political values, maybe not all of them, but I'm a big supporter of his.

But even beyond ideology, he is saying we need to make government work for the people of New York City. And the test case for progressivism is whether it can deliver better outcomes for the voters in the city. And that is not a matter of, you know, playing hardball ideologically. It's a matter of like filling potholes and actually getting 2K open and all the rest of it. The question for me is whether that is scalable as an approach to politics at the national level. I do take a lot of – I'm really heartened by Zoran and have been much more hopeful over the last year as a result of his rise than I would have been in the absence of him.

And I actually see a lot of parallels elsewhere in the country where, you know – Sure. We also have local leaders in other places who are leading the charge. San Francisco is now. That's a guy who's not, you would not consider ideological in terms of a leftist, but is building a more responsive government. And then you see Los Angeles, which is the antithesis of that, which is democratic governance that seems utterly unmoored from the needs of the people

or the desires of the people or what they think about things. And I do wonder one possibility here is that Americans come to, to see national politics, maybe they have already, as essentially culture war theater and actually look for responses from their local leaders because there's just so much more direct responsiveness there. You know, we already, to some degree, see the fight between Democrats and Republicans in D.C. as, you know, abstracted from our lived daily realities. but we may be much more engaged with mayors and governors, which may be one reason why we find them so much more popular than the people in D.C. who are so horrifically unpopular. I think that's absolutely right, but I'm heartened by,

because what's so interesting to me is one of the things that made the soil fertile for someone like Donald Trump is people feeling like government was no longer responsive to its needs. he took that dissatisfaction and used the tools of a demagogue. Oh, the problem is trans kids in sports and immigrants. And if we fix that, but he hasn't actually fixed it because he's not actually making government responsive to the needs of the people. He's making government responsive to the emotional kind of reflexive reptilian brains of the people.

But what that says to me, though, is, again, opportunity. Yeah, and I mean, I would just say, about Trump, just to sort of tie some of these things, these threads together. Yes. The story with Trump and climate is also really interesting because he is, you know, he is an avowal. Chinese hoax. And he's a hater of wind and hater of solar.

And he prioritized the destruction of the IRA first day office, first day in office, signing an executive order to undo it. You know, he's about as big a fossil fuel villain as you can imagine. He started all of these wars. in fossil fuel-rich places, in part because he actually still believes that we need to control the world's fossil fuel reserves. And yet, even in the context of that 90% of all new energy infrastructure built in the U.S. last year was green, 90%, which means for every unit of new dirty infrastructure we built, we built nine times as much clean energy infrastructure.

This year, the share is expected to be even larger. Is that, is that private industry? How is that even possible? Well, some of it is because though Trump tried to repeal all of the tax credits from the IRA, it was politically difficult given the power of the green energy companies. And so many of them have been placed on hold or are now being sunset, but sunset far enough in the future that companies can still take action on it. But mostly it's just because we have a basically mature fossil fuel infrastructure. We're still doing some amount of natural gas build out. But for, you know, oil and coal, we're not, we're just, we have a basically mature system. Right.

It's not where the growth is going to be. Yeah. And globally, that's true, too. I was just looking at a report on the other day that said that since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the world's energy importers, people who need energy, have spent five times more money investing in renewables and nuclear than they have in fossil fuel infrastructure, five times as much. The world's energy exporters, the people who are trying to set up. stuff on the world stage have spent twice as much investing in fossil fuels as they have in renewables

and nuclear. The irony, David, a war to preserve our dominance in fossil fuels has ultimately led the world to try and become more resilient and move away from it. And we're moving pretty rapidly in that direction. I think that there's going to be another inflection point in the green transition with this war. You know, we're still really far. from Net Zero. We're very far from stopping the warming of the planet. There are a lot of things to be worried about. I don't want to sound too Polyana-ish about it. But, you know, Michael Librick, who's, I think, a really thoughtful analyst just wrote a piece last week saying he thinks this war has brought the peak of global emissions on this side of 2030, whereas he used to think it was on the

other side of 2030. And once we've bent that curve, you know, it's a long way down. It's a long ski slope, but we're skiing. And I think that's, you know, that's the near-term future that we're looking at for That, can I tell you something? That may be the most hopeful metaphor analogy that I've heard here is once we start going downhill, we're skiing. So to wrap it around our original thought process, which is, yes, here are these threats. Climate, energy, demagogues, populism, and all these other, and AI and things that are so fraught with peril. and yet within all that, underneath it all, opportunity. And that's what's starting to be uncovered.

Yeah, I mean, you know, just this week, there was the national conference of oncologists that reported all of this great news on, you know, cancer breakthroughs. I mean, there is, you know, the future in many ways is bright. There are huge obstacles. We're living through difficult times. And on a personal level, the thing that is so painful to me is, having to abandon the suppositions that I grew up with as a child of the 90s, thinking that the future while progressing erratically would bring us in a sort of predictable way

towards more justice, more prosperity, more equality. I think we've learned that we need to fight for that rather than just like put the whole thing on autoplay. But I also think when you look at, for instance, the AI backlash or the backlash to Trump himself, who's, you know, the most unpopular president in history, now violating all those stories. We told ourselves in the first term about how he had it. He was Teflonan Don. We can't tell ourselves those stories anymore because he's incredibly unpopular, including with all the demographic groups that we told ourselves had amounted to a political relignment.

Right, right. We're seeing in all of those indicators that people are willing to fight. The question is whether, you know, the source. structures of power are assailable, or whether, as in the case with sort of, you know, the AI labs, whether they're now operating in some way beyond the reach of democratic control. And I'm not willing to, you know, I'm not willing to make a bet there either way. I may be a little more worried about that than you are. The fight is certainly visible.

The question is, you know, to what extent any of these institutions remain responsive or subject to popular will. Right. And I think ultimately that's the test. No, and I appreciate that. And I do. And oddly enough, because our conversations, and for those people who don't know, David and I have many conversations over the years are generally with me taking the role of the pessimist who

says we shouldn't believe in people and their ability of thing. And David explaining very patiently to me why there is progress on the horizon and why things are a little bit more optimistic. You know, I'm a famous optimist. I don't know if you knew that. Famous optimist. Famous. Famous. but but in in this instance i i believe i am more optimistic than you not because i've seen how these

systems can be bent and they can be bent by bad actors but boy oh boy they can be bent by good actors and if there has ever been a moment where this country and this world is ground down to a nub by the chaos and incoherence of a man-child who has been handed power he didn't earn. This is a moment. This is a moment where a good actor can assail, as you said, these towers of power and reform them in a way that benefits us. I really believe that.

Just want to say one thing to illustrate that and then one thing to complicate it. The illustrate point is, I want to take us back in time to the period between the election in 2024 and say March or April of 2025. Okay. When Donald Trump was returning to the White House and we were just awash in this sense that liberals, too, that MAGA was on the march, that there had been a political realignment in the country that Donald Trump was not, it wasn't just tragic and awful that Donald Trump was returning to the White House, but he was winning all of these voters, you know, all of these

votes from young voters, black voters, brown voters. He was rewriting the demographic coalition of the Republican Party and that he had effectively won the culture war, especially with the support of the tech billionaires. And now I think about, you know, this great American state fair that they tried to stage 15 months later. And they booked 10 people and it was like the headliners are like millie, vanilla, and mineral ice. That's the best they could do. And then all those people had to drop out because they were just like, this isn't for us. It's too costly. And it is. And it It's just so clear to me, the approval ratings show it, you know, but on the culture level, Donald Trump has not won the culture war.

He has lost the culture war. The podcasters are out on him. The, you know, entertainers are out on him. And I think to some degree, the story we told ourselves 15 months ago was a bit of an illusion, a self-lacerating illusion that liberals were telling themselves because they wanted to beat themselves up. And in fact, we were never as weak, and he was never as strong as he seemed. The complicating part of this story is you say someone can arrive, a new leader can arrive. And that is true.

But when I look at the Democratic Party in particular, there are a lot of people that I like. There are a lot of people that I admire. But there's no Barack Obama walking through those doors. And there's no idea. It's almost beyond even an individual. There's no theory of the case. And I think the theory of the case that we are making today, is one that they should be cognizant of.

And I think the theory of the case is there to be made. I actually really think it's within their grasp. It's just a simple formulation of people want to feel like they're getting value for their money. And government has to be aligned along that axis. Forget about anything else. And it's there for the taking. and I think if somebody is able to to formulate that in a coherent way,

they've got a real leg up into that. That's what I would say. And that's why I remain always hopeful within that. From your lips to God's ears. Because I'm famously optimistic. David, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you, man. You too. David Wallace Wells, obviously you can see him in the New York Times opinion,

columnist and New York Times Magazine and obviously the bestseller. The uninhabitable Earth, life after warming. David, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos.

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To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Guys, can I share something? Yeah, please. I feel weirdly like giddy. I think it's really telling that David Wallace Wells, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, is one of the more optimistic conversations that we've had in a while.

Isn't that crazy? I also think it's concerning that he's getting his optimism from Millie Vanilly. Well, Rob, not Millie, not Vanilly. It's really just Millie. But I'll tell you why I feel so energized. There was a moment when he was described, it's sort of felt like a shark tank moment,

like where you go like, there's got to be a better way. Like the way that he was talking about how liberalism functions specifically through the vestiges of government, how the summers of it all designs the program and the grant and answers all the questions and Doc because he's the smartest person that's ever existed and they just put it into the fax machine and send it out and it gets deployed.

Yeah, it always works that way. It always works that way. It made me realize one of those like, there's got to be a better way, and there is. and that there is actually a theory of government that can be more reactive that can take into account the negative consequences, the unforeseen collateral damages of even the well-intentioned policies and try and address it in a proactive way that can preempt the hollowing out of the Midwest, that can preempt the kinds of difficult resentments that arise through immigration.

It can be done. Yes. I feel it. I know. I mean, I would agree. I really like there's moments when you feel really hopeful because it does sometimes feel like we are turning a corner. And we're seeing a really affirmative case being made right now in New York City.

And people are loving it. I mean. San Francisco, too. You know, we don't spend much time out there because it's obviously. I spend a little time. out there, as you know. Gillian has it. For those of you don't know at home,

Gillian has an unhealthy relationship with, I think, unhealthy with the San Francisco Giants. Right now it's pretty abusive, yeah. Now, even, and by the way, that's coming from a Mets fan. Things are darker for the San Francisco Giants and for the New York Mets.

That's right. So even within that. But, but, and two, polar opposite visions of what maybe liberalism might be, but are making government in those places or trying to at least more responsive. And you know what they're also doing is like broadcasting what they're doing. Yes. They're showing people, here's how government is working for you. I'm not just going to assign something into effect. I'm going to show you how it's being effective. Simply too. Yeah. People love it. And hopefully acknowledging when it's not the transparency

see of at all. I think if you can just connect those things, the actions of the government with the money that you're putting in and the value that might be coming out of it, people will start to, you can start to earn their trust again. It's not an easy process, but it's one that must be undertaken if we're to recapture, you know, whatever the backlash will be to this toxic nationalism and populism that's arising. Yeah. I thought it was interesting when he was saying how Trump has lost the culture war right now. And I do agree with that. I feel like on the outside, yeah, I'm feeling that change.

But on the inside, I don't know that I 100% agree with that. Like, yes, we're seeing everyone back out of this concert and stuff. But like, we're also seeing people he endorse win primaries. But that's also a very narrow, you know, because it's the base. But what I would say to that is there's a difference between losing something and somebody beating you. And right now nobody's beaten him. A lot of this is self-owns. Yeah. And at my point was that the Democrats have not been able to mount a convincing alternative to what he was offering. He's just so fucking incompetent that he's losing it. And they're almost leaning in. Yeah.

They're almost saying government actually can't work for you. So you shouldn't have to pay taxes if you don't make a certain amount of money. Right. As opposed to saying, you're going to pay your tax. It's going to be a progressive tax rate. Other people are going to pay more. And we're going to make the system work as well as it does for them for you. That's right. Yeah. And it's not enough for them to say, like, we're going to tax the billionaires. If people don't believe that you're going to use that money in any way that benefits their lives, they're just not going to give a shit. Absolutely. Brittany, what do we got? What do we got? All righty. Now that I'm fired up. I love positive John. Positive Johnny. John, what is your favorite topic to talk about on the podcast? Sandwiches. Almost always sandwiches.

This is a sandwich podcast. Yeah. In fact, if we could do the sandwich podcast, I think I would do it. Do you guys have a sense of my favorite topics? Because I don't, I would say food is probably. Really? I was going to go with an economist. No, that's my most, that's my most fearful.

Economic, can I tell you something? Economists are my. Bet Noir. They are my white whale. I am I am Ahab. I am always on the search of an economist who will not treat me condescendingly, although we do find them actually. Yeah, we have. Yeah. We've had some lovely ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doron was lovely. The guys from MIT. Clara Matte was great. Yeah, Kitty Richards. That's right. Yeah. It's so nice to know that in Boston you can be an economist and not an asshole. Oh my gosh. Yeah. The combination of those two things, Boston and economist.

Oh, God. Right. It's not a good, it's not a good combination. But yes, I do love talking about that stuff and egg sandwiches. I would say the two that are my favorite. But I'd be happy to hear from the audience. Taco Bell. Can I tell you something?

Food. It's food. It really is. We record so close to lunchtime. It's just that the CrunchRapture premium. It's not just that it's food. It's that it's the engineering supremac. of it all. It's that...

Manufacturing. It's U.S. manufacturing. It's also food that you imagine was drawn up on an architect's table. A very high architect. You imagine somebody with a T-square going, what if we just, you know, a burrito is so fucking easy. You just stuff it with shit

and you roll it up. What if we get... What about a parallelogram? What if we take a fold it this way? Hold on. Let me get my T-square and a protractor and figure out where I can put the beans. We have got to get talk about to sponsor us.

By the way, they already do. They just don't know it. They are the fuel that keeps me going on there. What else we got? All right. Next. John, how long do you think Trump and his, quote, extreme intelligence would last on jeopardy? Oh, God.

On jeopardy? Jillian, you can answer this. You're the... I don't think he would have good buzzer skills. That hand is like a little... It's seen better days. boy is that true but talk about the bruising that would occur after after a match i think the only difference with trump is he would still answer like even if he wasn't he wouldn't wait till the end

he would just blurt it out or do that but i've always felt that for intel so where's your brain located it's the head and the head is at the top of it's sort of like if you think about it as a new apartment building. It's the water tower. Okay. And what's the most important thing in the water tower? Pressure. And the hydroxide. And what does Trump have? Chronic, Venus, insufficiency. He's got shitty water pressure. Wow. So what happens? Not good. No, no water pressure, no good shower, no good shower. Flushes are kind of hard to come by. So as far as jeopardy is concerned, this dude's not getting the water pressure.

I mean, he only just found out dumb has a B in it. So I don't know if, I don't know if jeopardy is the right. The idea that he was saying to her, and for those who don't know, he was describing how he came up with the Democrat. And he was explaining to Lara Trump, you know, I thought Democrat, you know, and I dropped the B because most people don't know there's a B in that. And I'm like, well, most people who aren't dumb, no. Oh, he set himself up for that one.

Yeah. How is this real? He is definitely a more of a Wheel of Fortune guy, I would say. I don't think even, I think even the spinning of the wheel would throw him off. Vertigo. What's our last one? What's our last one? Last one.

John, do your kids like you? Why would they? I hope so. I hope that not only do they love me, that they like me, because I, I love them, but I also really like them. I find them very good company. I find them fascinating, interesting, singular people that I enjoy. And by the way, not just heavy, you know, oh, let's talk about life and, you know, different things.

I like just being with them, around them. It's fun. They're fun. They have they both have great senses of humor. They're both really smart. They're fun to be around. Where they got all that from? Tracy.

You guys met Tracy. You know what I'm talking about. But yeah, but oh, God, that's one of those questions like where you almost feel like the hair on the back of your neck go up like, what? What have you heard? Did they submit this question? Like, do your kids like you? Like that, I think as far as like a parent's fear, that would be like, that'd be on the list. Other than like health, their health, their happiness, all that stuff, them not liking you would be like, oh shit, like devastating.

Yeah. Do you think there is ever a time that they didn't like you? Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, so relationships are fraught. matter how beautiful and wonderful and deep and intense that, you know, and I'm sure there are moments of frustration and there are patterns of behavior and answers that I know that I probably do, that I roll. But within healthy relationships is grace. And we have hopefully grace for each other

in those moments of understanding that we'll be, that the baseline of our relationship is, respect and love and like, even though there's moments I'm sure where like I can be a pain in the ass, if that makes sense. We all can. But I also think it changes as kids get older and stuff. I mean, I don't have young kids, but I just know being a kid, like my mom and I definitely went through it when we were teenagers, but then I still get older, you know, you find a friendship and you find hobbies together and you love doing things. It's, you definitely grow into being more friends as well, which is such a beautiful new chapter. Mm-hmm.

I wonder if the tough times are necessary because otherwise you'd never leave. Yeah, I think that's probably true. Yeah, we, I mean, we laugh about it now. Like, man, I was 16, I was stealing the car. Sneaking out windows. Wait, I thought, wait, hold on a second. That just took a turn.

Yeah, Brittany. That turned from like, you know, we went through it a little bit. Like, we used to fight a little bit and like I kind of slept late and stuff and I stole the car. Oh, yeah. Oh, and I committed grand theft auto. Armed larceny.

Oh, and I robbed a liquor store. Jillian, did you go through it at that age? Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think everybody does. Yeah, teenage eggs, you know, that's necessary. They have to separate from you because when they're young, it's the most beautiful thing. But you know it has to end.

And the heartbreak of parenting is that, is that you know when they think you're Superman that at some point they're going to realize. You're going to make me cry. All right, I won't do that. All right. We'll move on. We'll move on.

Oh, we have a question before we wrap. Yes, yes, yes. Complete this sentence. All right. Nix in. Oh, anything. Nicks in anything. God willing Nixon anything.

Please. Are you going? I'm hoping to. I'm trying not to think about it. I'm so excited. We'll always have the Mets to fall back on. Settle down. Settle down.

Brittany, how do they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast, and you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show at John Stewart. Fantastic. Thank you guys very much. And thanks for keeping in touch with this and asking those. provocative and sometimes emotionally wounding questions.

Thanks, as always to everybody. Couldn't do it without you. Producer, Brittany Mehmedevich, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Robotoa, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce and our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Thanks so much, guys, and we will see you next week. Bo boy. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast.

It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.